Ingress vs Load Balancer
I am quite confused about the roles of Ingress and Load Balancer in Kubernetes.
As far as I understand Ingress is used to map incoming traffic from the internet to the services running in the cluster.
The role of load balancer is to forward traffic to a host. In that regard how does ingress differ from load balancer? Also what is the concept of load balancer inside kubernetes as compared to Amazon ELB and ALB?
Solution 1:
Load Balancer: A kubernetes LoadBalancer service is a service that points to external load balancers that are NOT in your kubernetes cluster, but exist elsewhere. They can work with your pods, assuming that your pods are externally routable. Google and AWS provide this capability natively. In terms of Amazon, this maps directly with ELB and kubernetes when running in AWS can automatically provision and configure an ELB instance for each LoadBalancer service deployed.
Ingress: An ingress is really just a set of rules to pass to a controller that is listening for them. You can deploy a bunch of ingress rules, but nothing will happen unless you have a controller that can process them. A LoadBalancer service could listen for ingress rules, if it is configured to do so.
You can also create a NodePort service, which has an externally routable IP outside the cluster, but points to a pod that exists within your cluster. This could be an Ingress Controller.
An Ingress Controller is simply a pod that is configured to interpret ingress rules. One of the most popular ingress controllers supported by kubernetes is nginx. In terms of Amazon, ALB can be used as an ingress controller.
For an example, this nginx controller is able to ingest ingress rules you have defined and translate them to an nginx.conf file that it loads and starts in its pod.
Let's for instance say you defined an ingress as follows:
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
annotations:
ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: /
name: web-ingress
spec:
rules:
- host: kubernetes.foo.bar
http:
paths:
- backend:
serviceName: appsvc
servicePort: 80
path: /app
If you then inspect your nginx controller pod you'll see the following rule defined in /etc/nginx.conf:
server {
server_name kubernetes.foo.bar;
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
set $proxy_upstream_name "-";
location ~* ^/web2\/?(?<baseuri>.*) {
set $proxy_upstream_name "apps-web2svc-8080";
port_in_redirect off;
client_max_body_size "1m";
proxy_set_header Host $best_http_host;
# Pass the extracted client certificate to the backend
# Allow websocket connections
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $the_real_ip;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $the_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $best_http_host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port $pass_port;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $pass_access_scheme;
proxy_set_header X-Original-URI $request_uri;
proxy_set_header X-Scheme $pass_access_scheme;
# mitigate HTTPoxy Vulnerability
# https://www.nginx.com/blog/mitigating-the-httpoxy-vulnerability-with-nginx/
proxy_set_header Proxy "";
# Custom headers
proxy_connect_timeout 5s;
proxy_send_timeout 60s;
proxy_read_timeout 60s;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_buffering off;
proxy_buffer_size "4k";
proxy_buffers 4 "4k";
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_cookie_domain off;
proxy_cookie_path off;
rewrite /app/(.*) /$1 break;
rewrite /app / break;
proxy_pass http://apps-appsvc-8080;
}
Nginx has just created a rule to route http://kubernetes.foo.bar/app to point to the service appsvc in your cluster.
Here is an example of how to implement a kubernetes cluster with an nginx ingress controller. Hope this helps!
Solution 2:
I found this very interesting article which explains the differences between NodePort, LoadBalancer and Ingress.
From the content present in the article:
LoadBalancer:
A LoadBalancer service is the standard way to expose a service to the internet. On GKE, this will spin up a Network Load Balancer that will give you a single IP address that will forward all traffic to your service.
If you want to directly expose a service, this is the default method. All traffic on the port you specify will be forwarded to the service. There is no filtering, no routing, etc. This means you can send almost any kind of traffic to it, like HTTP, TCP, UDP, Websockets, gRPC, or whatever.
The big downside is that each service you expose with a LoadBalancer will get its own IP address, and you have to pay for a LoadBalancer per exposed service, which can get expensive!
Ingress:
Ingress is actually NOT a type of service. Instead, it sits in front of multiple services and act as a “smart router” or entrypoint into your cluster.
You can do a lot of different things with an Ingress, and there are many types of Ingress controllers that have different capabilities.
The default GKE ingress controller will spin up a HTTP(S) Load Balancer for you. This will let you do both path based and subdomain based routing to backend services. For example, you can send everything on foo.yourdomain.com to the foo service, and everything under the yourdomain.com/bar/ path to the bar service.
Ingress is probably the most powerful way to expose your services, but can also be the most complicated. There are many types of Ingress controllers, from the Google Cloud Load Balancer, Nginx, Contour, Istio, and more. There are also plugins for Ingress controllers, like the cert-manager, that can automatically provision SSL certificates for your services.
Ingress is the most useful if you want to expose multiple services under the same IP address, and these services all use the same L7 protocol (typically HTTP). You only pay for one load balancer if you are using the native GCP integration, and because Ingress is “smart” you can get a lot of features out of the box (like SSL, Auth, Routing, etc)